421–430 of 613 posts
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Ask it differently. Ask it about time. "Does it make sense that the people voting today can decide to stop other people from voting here in the future?" That's what zoning, housing policy and other local government decisions are capable of doing.
Of course it makes sense. They’re the people who have the biggest stake in the place that they live, and in the community that they built.
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There's no inalienable right to not be cripplingly impoverished. But any ethical countries would try to ameliorate that condition. Is it ethical for a select few to grow enormously wealthy by driving up the cost of living for the many by deliberately causing a shortage of a basic need? People need jobs to live. They also need a roof over their heads. The jobs are becoming increasingly concentrated in a few metro area…
> The jobs are becoming increasingly concentrated in a few metro areas, but the home-owning class constrains the supply of housing and drives up the price of their own assets. Disincentivizing this sort of rent seeking behavior is precisely the kind of thing property taxes accomplish. There are two solutions to that problem. Governments could either make it easier to rent in the increasingly concentrated metro areas,…
I'm not saying people should stop living there, but stopping densification will not help curb climate change and sustainable environment.
Also, not everyone wants to live in non-dense places.
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This already happens in the midwest, where taxes are based on appraised value and someone from New York buying 160 acres of hunting land for some overpriced amount causes the small landholder next door to have to pay triple taxes.
Where I live, NJ, tax amounts aren't calculated that way. They're derived from some complex mens based on local budgets. Since the towns rich people live in have the same budget it has the strange effect of everyone there paying much smaller percentage of property taxes.
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Ask it differently. Ask it about time. "Does it make sense that the people voting today can decide to stop other people from voting here in the future?" That's what zoning, housing policy and other local government decisions are capable of doing.
I don't want people living in San Francisco voting on my small Midwestern town's policies or elections just because they might hypothetically choose to live here one day. Likewise, I don't want non-Americans living in Europe or elsewhere voting in state or federal elections because they might someday choose to become American citizens. In both cases, those people might vote then end up never following through on thei…
It's about whether the people currently living in X should be able to arrange things so that certain other groups of people will be impeded from living in X in the future.
There's clearly room for some debate there: most people would agree that nations can set their own standards for immigration and that these may exclude large classes of people.
However, if a town explicitly said "we do not want anyone who earns less than 400% of median household income to move here", I think that most people would find that at least a little troubling.
There really are not any mechanisms that would allow a US municipality to say that explicitly. However, things like zoning laws can be used to go fairly far in this direction in a more implicit way.
I think that's wrong.
Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners. I'm not fully clear on this statement. Is it putting forth that local governments shouldn't be controlled by the people who are local, or is it saying that homeowners hold more power than renters? If the former, that's just silly. If the latter, renters get the same one vote per person as eve…
It may be, as in this case, that homeowners actively try to protect their asset by excluding non-homeowners from the market, perhaps by obstructing the construction of new houses, or by supporting the inflation of house prices. Is that a good situation just because it is sanctioned by a majority?
In liberal societies, there are side-constraints on what a demos can sanction - it cannot, for example, curtail the free speech of individuals. There is no reason why that should not be the case with respect to certain basic means of life, like housing.
The Vox article says > The LVT also has an appealing underlying moral framework: The luck to own a piece of land that happens to appreciate — say, you bought a house in San Francisco before the tech boom — should not come with it the ability to extract rents without providing value. It seems a bit presumptious to say it is all luck - that somebody couldn't have predicted that the land would appreciate and thus bought…
Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners. I'm not fully clear on this statement. Is it putting forth that local governments shouldn't be controlled by the people who are local, or is it saying that homeowners hold more power than renters? If the former, that's just silly. If the latter, renters get the same one vote per person as eve…
This attitude here is precisely why local zoning is ineffective. The people who are negatively impacted by anti-development policies are the ones that don't get the privilege of living in economically powerful population centers in the first place. Sure, the home-owners might grumble about an apartment blocking their view, more crowded restaurants, or "neighborhood character as a city grows. The people who are negati…
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I personally believe it'd be great if people like you could completely divest themselves from nation-states. You don't want to contribute to a commonwealth, that's fine, you can rough it over there and live a sad, cold, hungry existence. The vast majority of the comforts of modern life are afforded specifically and only because other people contribute to the common cause. You reject your responsibility to contribute…
I personally feel it’d be great if people like you could stop thinking that all property is inherently society’s property and that I should be thankful society allows me to reside on it. We are all in it together, but we will all be better off when others stop trying to appropriate everything from me and give it to others just because they want it. I work hard for what I have. I shouldn’t have to have it taken away i…
I've long advocated a land value tax. I would suggest that any reform of this nature, that eliminates private capture of economic rent, accompany one-time compensation to the parties that lose that economic rent, so in this case, compensation to make up for the loss in property value that a LVT would incur. The same should apply to any other repeal of rent-seeking institutions: anti-labor-competitive laws privileging…
I am rather skeptic of land value taxes, but I would like to hear your view of why land value tax is better than simply raising the tax on rent and property sales. The main argument that I see against land value taxes is that land doesn't generate any income by itself, which forces people to pay money in situation where they might not have any income to do so. One could bypass this problem by putting in limitations,…
Tax has nothing to do with raising money. It’s about releasing real resources for the public good - largely people to provide public services. Ideally the tax needs to be incident on the private sector entities that would otherwise hire the people the public sector needs to hire instead - military, judiciary, police, healthcare, education, etc.
Government has no need of land, therefore it makes no sense to tax it. Expecting the incidence to end up in the correct place requires a faith in fungibility that just isn’t borne out in practice.
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> deliberately causing a shortage of a basic need There’s no housing shortage. There’s a limited supply in highly desirable locations because they’re highly desirable. People can and do live elsewhere, working local jobs or commuting. > The jobs are becoming increasingly concentrated in a few metro areas That’s just one of many problems of scale; the solution is not to keep scaling up. > … the home-owning class const…
Just to address this from a non US standpoint. While I'm sympathetic toward both the desire to preserve the character and community of a neighbourhood and your antipathy towards rentiers - there absolutely is a housing crisis across Europe (and presumably in the US). Part of the reason is the lack of social housing provision, with most EU governments reducing or all together abandoning their post war commitments to l…
This is a great policy. Owning land you don't live on is perversity on the scale of deciding a patch of ocean is yours and shooting at any boat that crosses it.